Abstract
Several episodic simulation studies have suggested that the plausibility of future events may be influenced by the disparateness of the details comprising the event. However, no study had directly investigated this idea. In the current study, we designed a novel episodic combination paradigm that varied the disparateness of details through a social sphere manipulation. Participants recalled memory details from three different social spheres. Details were recombined either within spheres or across spheres to create detail sets for which participants imagined future events in a second session. Across-sphere events were rated as significantly less plausible than within-sphere events and were remembered less often. The presented paradigm, which increases control over the disparateness of details in future event simulations, may be useful for future studies concerned with the similarity of the simulations to previous events and its plausibility.
ORCID
Valerie van Mulukom http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0549-7365
Daniel L. Schacter http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2460-6061
Michael C. Corballis http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3126-6114
Donna Rose Addis http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6231-1491
Notes
1The delay duration between detail recollection and future event simulations did not correlate with the percentage of future events recalled (r = .04, p = .85).
2Given that the nonsignificant difference of temporal distance between the sphere conditions was nevertheless a medium-sized effect (dz = 0.46), we explored whether temporal distance correlated with key dependent variables. These correlations were generally weak (plausibility: r = −.25, p = .26; detail: r = −.14, p = .54; coherency: r = −.22, p = .32, difficulty: r = .14, p = .52; emotion: r = .10, p = .64), suggesting that differences in temporal distance on the order of a few weeks are not likely to affect phenomenology of details that were imagined to occur more than a year in the future.
3We calculated a percentage of the total events per sphere condition rather than comparing the number of recalled trials directly as the number of total trials could slightly differ between the sphere conditions due to the exclusion criteria (see the beginning of the Results section).